How we cite our quotes: Citations follow this format: (Section.Paragraph)
Quote #1
He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. (1.1)
We think the dream here refers to the biblical story of Jonah and the Whale. So Jonah, a good man and a prophet, is supposed to go to Nineveh and tell the people there to repent or else. He doesn't and ends up being swallowed by a whale. The Man and The Boy are kind of like Jonah, only the whole world has become the belly of the whale. They're wandering a world of desperate hunger, a maw (or stomach!) terrible enough to discourage anyone.
Quote #2
He came forward, holding his belt by one hand. The holes in it marked the progress of his emaciation and the leather at one side had a lacquered look to it where he was used to stropping the blade of his knife. He stepped down into the roadcut and he looked at the gun and he looked at the boy. Eyes collared in cups of grime and deeply sunk. Like an animal inside a skull looking out the eyeholes. He wore a beard that had been cut square across the bottom with shears and he had a tattoo of a bird on his neck done by someone with an illformed notion of their appearance. He was lean, wiry, rachitic. Dressed in a pair of filthy blue coveralls and a black billcap with the logo of some vanished enterprise embroidered across the front of it. (102.5)
McCarthy, through dialogue between The Man and The Boy, divides most of the characters in the novel into "good guys" and "bad guys." This is one of the "bad guys." Certainly the character has been pushed by hunger to evil ("the holes in [his belt] [. . .] marked the progress of his emaciation"), but he also seems wildly inhuman ("like an animal inside a skull"). And his bird tattoo – a creature who often represents human striving or transcendence – is crudely drawn. We wonder how long it took for him to get this way. Does evil happen all at once in the novel or by degrees?
Quote #3
This was the first human being other than the boy that he'd spoken to in more than a year. My brother at last. The reptilian calculations in those cold and shifting eyes. The gray and rotting teeth. Claggy with human flesh. Who has made of the world a lie every word. When he woke again the snow had stopped and the grainy dawn was shaping out the naked woodlands beyond the bridge, the trees black against the snow. He was lying curled up with his hands between his knees and he sat up and got the fire going and he set a can of beets in the embers. The boy lay huddled on the ground watching him. (118.1)
Although McCarthy draws a pretty fierce line between the "good guys" and the "bad guys" in the novel, here's an instance where it seems like The Man wanders into "bad guys" category. Why does The Man call the marauder "My brother at last"? This is the marauder who would have eaten The Boy if given a half a chance. Perhaps it's because The Man had to resort to killing him. Self-defense doesn't make The Man as evil as the marauder, but maybe it puts him in the same ballpark.
Quote #4
He [The Boy] sat there cowled in the blanket. After a while he looked up. Are we still the good guys? he said.
[The Man:] Yes. We're still the good guys.
[The Boy:] And we always will be.
[The Man:] Yes. We always will be.
[The Boy:] Okay. (120.7-120.11)
This exchange happens pretty soon after The Man had to kill the roadrat. The Boy wants to know if they're still "good guys" after killing someone. Despite his doubts earlier that morning, The Man thinks they are still "good guys." We agree. But we also think McCarthy plays around with his terms here. There are actually no "good guys" in the strictest, most traditional sense. There are just the "sometimes-morally-compromised-but-mostly-good guys."
Quote #5
An army in tennis shoes, tramping. Carrying three-foot lengths of pipe with leather wrappings. [. . .] The phalanx following carried spears or lances tasseled with ribbons, the long blades hammered out of trucksprings in some crude forge upcountry. [. . .] Behind them came wagons drawn by slaves in harness and piled with goods of war and after that the women, perhaps a dozen in number, some of them pregnant, and lastly a supplementary consort of catamites illcothed against the cold and fitted in dogcollars and yoked each to each. All passed on. They lay listening.
[The Boy:] Are they gone, Papa?
[The Man:] Yes, they're gone.
[The Boy:] Did you see them?
[The Man:] Yes.
[The Boy:] Were they the bad guys?
[The Man:] Yes, they were the bad guys. (141.4-141.10)
It seems like another giveaway of the "bad guys" is that they keep slaves with them. The Man and The Boy, on the other hand, spend a lot of energy trying not to harm others. We think good and evil in this book have a lot to do with how one responds to desperate situations: do you prey on those weaker than yourself, or do you avoid others and try to retain some sliver of decency like The Man? Or, like The Boy, do you go above and beyond the call of duty and care for those worse off than yourself? We think the gap between this bloodcult on the road and The Boy seems nearly unbridgeable.
Quote #6
Look at me, the man said.
He turned and looked. He looked like he'd been crying.
[The Man:] Just tell me.
[The Boy:] We wouldnt ever eat anybody, would we?
[The Man:] No. Of course not.
[The Boy:] Even if we were starving?
[The Man:] We're starving now.
[The Boy:] You said we werent.
[The Man:] I said we werent dying. I didnt say we werent starving.
[The Boy:] But we wouldnt.
[The Man:] No. We wouldnt.
[The Boy:] No matter what.
[The Man:] No. No matter what.
[The Boy:] Because we're the good guys.
[The Man:] Yes.
[The Boy:] And we're carrying the fire. (195.12-195.29)
[The Man:] And we're carrying the fire. Yes.
[The Boy:] Okay.
We're not exactly sure what the fire is, but it seems to have to do with human goodness and decency. The dialogue here further explains the difference between the "good guys" and the "bad guys." It's a major difference, let it be said: the "good guys" don't eat other people, no matter how hungry they get. This is a code of basic moral decency The Man has constructed that can't be broached. ("No matter what," as The Man says.) Does The Man have any other basic, unbreakable principles? What about The Boy – does he have his own set of principles?
Quote #7
They began to come upon from time to time small cairns of rock by the roadside. They were signs in gypsy language, lost patterans. The first he'd seen in some while, common in the north, leading out of the looted and exhausted cities, hopeless messages to loved ones lost and dead. By then all stores of food had given out and murder was everywhere upon the land. The world soon to be largely populated by men who would eat your children in front of your eyes and the cities themselves held by cores of blackened looters who tunneled among the ruins and crawled from the rubble white of tooth and eye carrying charred and anonymous tins of food in nylon nets like shoppers in the commissaries of hell. [. . . ]Out on the roads the pilgrims sank down and fell over and died and the bleak and shrouded earth went trundling past the sun and returned again as trackless and as unremarked as the path of any nameless sisterworld in the ancient dark beyond. (250.1)
There's a ton here, but we want to focus on the slow dwindling of the pilgrims. (We think McCarthy uses the words "pilgrims" and "good guys" more or less interchangeably.) At first, after the "long shear of light," there is still some human affection out there: people write messages to each other with patterans (coded signs). As the stores of food disappear, "blackened looters," the ruthless and unprincipled, seem to take over. Soon enough, most of the pilgrims or "good guys" die on the road. Which brings up a nagging question – if The Boy and The Man are "good guys," how are they still alive?
Quote #8
Standing at the edge of a winter field among rough men. The boy's age. A little older. Watching while they opened up the rocky hillside ground with pick and mattock and brought to light a great bolus of serpents perhaps a hundred in number. Collected there for a common warmth. The dull tubes of them beginning to move sluggishly in the cold hard light. Like the bowels of some great beast exposed to the day. The men poured gasoline on them and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be. The burning snakes twisted horribly and some crawled burning across the floor of the grotto to illuminate its darker recesses. As they were mute there were no screams of pain and the men watched them burn and writhe and blacken in just such silence themselves and they disbanded in silence in the winter dusk each with his own thoughts to go home to their suppers. (261.1)
This is a scene The Man witnessed in his childhood. We wonder if the evils perpetrated in McCarthy's post-apocalyptic world continue to occur simply because no one knows how to deal with them. Consider this sentence: "The men poured gasoline on them [the snakes] and burned them alive, having no remedy for evil but only for the image of it as they conceived it to be." Pretty heavy stuff.
Perhaps no one imagined the evil people could do to each other, and thus had no remedy against it? What happens when evil changes shape? How do you deal with a new evil? And what if we only know the various shapes of evil – and can destroy them – but can never destroy evil itself? McCarthy thinks you'd end up in a world similar to the one in The Road.
Quote #9
[The Boy:] Do you remember that little boy, Papa?
[The Man:] Yes. I remember him.
[The Boy:] Do you think that he's all right that little boy?
[The Man:] Oh yes. I think he's all right.
[The Boy:] Do you think he was lost?
[The Man:] No. I dont think he was lost.
[The Boy:] I'm scared that he was lost.
[The Man:] I think he's all right.
[The Boy:] But who will find him if he's lost? Who will find the little boy?
[The Man:] Goodness will find the little boy. It always has. It will again. (384.1-384.10)
This is a pretty complicated exchange. The Man is dying and The Boy knows it. (In fact, The Man will die in the next paragraph.) Faced with his father's death, The Boy remembers the child he saw (or thought he saw) wandering the rubble of a city. Won't that be him soon? The series of questions The Boy asks The Man really have to do with himself. He's not just worrying about the child he saw once, he's worrying about his own imminent abandonment.
The Man's response is quite bold, given the circumstances: Goodness will find The Boy. We're actually a little unsure what The Man means here. Does The Man mean "good" people will find The Boy, or does he mean The Boy will continue to be good and that will sustain him?
Quote #10
[The Veteran:] Where's the man you were with?
[The Boy:] He died.
[. . .]
[The Veteran:] I think you should come with me.
[The Boy:] Are you one of the good guys?
The man pulled his hood back from his face. His hair was long and matted. He looked at the sky. As if there were anything there to be seen. He looked at the boy. Yeah, he said. I'm one of the good guys.
[. . .]
[The Boy:] Are you carrying the fire?
[The Veteran:] Am I what?
[The Boy:] Carrying the fire.
[The Veteran:] You're kind of weirded out, arent you?
[The Boy:] No.
[The Veteran:] Just a little.
[The Boy:] Yeah.
[The Veteran:] That's okay.
[The Boy:] So are you?
[The Veteran:] What, carrying the fire?
[The Boy:] Yes.
[The Veteran:] Yeah, we are.
[The Boy:] Do you have any kids?
[The Veteran:] We do.
[. . .]
[The Boy:] And you didnt eat them.
[The Veteran:] No.
[The Boy:] You dont eat people.
[The Veteran:] No. We dont eat people.
[The Boy:] And I can go with you?
[The Veteran:] Yes. You can.
[The Boy:] Okay then.
[The Veteran:] Okay. (386.2-386.49)
In an unexpected turn of events, someone good (or at least someone who seems good) does appear on the road. It turns out The Man and The Boy are not the only ones.
McCarthy has foreshadowed The Man's death pretty much throughout the whole book, so it's no surprise when he dies. With the destruction of the world and the father's death, McCarthy has written himself into a pretty bleak corner. But we think this is actually a pretty happy ending. Other good people have survived, and The Boy doesn't end up alone.